“Brr,” Harp complains again. I know Harper is not that cold, she’s just got an aversion to it. She was excited to see snow the first time, and then she was ready to hit the tropics. But we’re still doing the Dino Smurf tour of the West. So…

“It’s the Winter Solstice, Harper. It’s like a big deal or something.”

“No,” she laughs. “The Summer Solstice is a big deal. The Winter Solstice is something no one in Wyoming gives a crap about. It’s dark at four o’clock. It’s freezing. And it’s just… wrong.”

“Hey, you know what?”

“What?” she asks as we continue to climb.

“It’s almost sundown. So we can hang out and watch the sunset.”

“No, thank you,” she laughs. “I’m all about one quick look at this wheel thing, then we’re out of here.”

When we finally get to the top Sasha is just standing there, looking over at the fenced-in area where the wheel is. Should be.

“You can’t see it,” she says, disappointed. “The snow is covering it all up.”

“Fuck.” I’m such a loser. I never even thought about the snow covering up the rocks.

“You can see some of them, Sash,” Harper says. “Look, there’s the tip of one.”

The medicine wheel is a wheel made out of rocks placed in the ground hundreds of years ago by the native people in this area. It’s pretty crooked and if you ask me, you have to use your imagination on the best of days to see a wheel. But even crooked squiggly lines of rocks are better than no rocks.

“But you can’t see the spokes,” Sasha says. “I knew it was stupid to come.”

She was supposed to come here with her father for the last Summer Solstice. But we were hiding out at Merc’s desert house that night. And her father was dead. So yeah, that trip was canceled.

And then she said she never wanted to come see it. We’ve driven by this national forest dozens of times in the past six months hunting dinosaurs. But she refused to stop.

Until I offered to bring her for the Winter Solstice.

“Let’s go,” Sasha says, turning around to head back down the hill to the truck. “I’m done.”

“Wait,” I say, grabbing her jacket as she passes me. “We can make our own spokes. Look.” I walk over to the fence and step over it. The snow is so high along the fence, that’s easy to do. And then I walk out to the center of the circle and lie down in the snow. “Come here, girls. We’ll make our own spokes and watch the sunset.”

I expect Harper to be the first to groan, but she surprises me. “Come on, Sasha. We won’t let a little snow ruin our trip.” She walks out to me and positions herself a little to the left, with her head touching mine. And then she pats the ground on her left. “Here’s your spot, Sasha! Come on.”

Sasha’s boots crunch along in the snow as she walks out towards us in silence. She takes her place on Harper’s left and my right. Her head touches both of ours, and she lets out a sigh. “Now what?”

“Now,” Harper says. “We watch the sunset. And wait for the stars.”

The mountains are so high up this way, the sun is already behind them, but the light hasn’t yet faded. We’re in the perfect moment of dusk. When the air is not yet black from night, but still has that hazy blue-grey of in-between.

We’ve watched hundreds of sunsets over the past six months. Not every night. We forget sometimes. But almost every night.

That moment passes quickly and then the night is upon us.

We lie there, three spokes in a wheel, for several minutes before Harper’s mittened hand points to the sky. “There,” she says. “You can’t see Orion in the summer. So if you came here on a summer night instead, you’d miss him.”

Sasha asks questions about the stars and Harper answers them. She tells stories of sailing the seas looking up at the sky to know where they were heading. She tells stories of the constellations and the myths behind them.

And Sasha listens with the ear of a girl deeply interested in these things. A girl who needs more than just one long road-trip as her formal education.

This is the moment I decide that my Smurf can’t stay with us anymore. She can’t lose the childhood the Company stole from her.

This is the moment I realize, maybe for the first time in my life, that what I’m doing is wrong.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Ford - Christmas Eve - Fort Collins, CO

I pace the length of the front room of our house, staring down at my minions. The face-eaters, as Spencer and Veronica affectionately call them, are lined up in front of the Christmas tree. The blinking lights reflect in their brown eyes.

We have three highly trained protection dogs now that Five is here. I look across the open space first floor of our historic bungalow in Fort Collins, and spy Veronica cuddling Five to her chest as Ashleigh hovers over her, talking a mile a minute about our baby. Veronica’s swollen belly, ready to deliver in just a few more weeks, provides a convenient place for little Five to rest his tiny bootied feet.

I smile at Ashleigh when I catch her looking at me and she smiles back, rocking a fussy one-year-old Kate to her chest. And then I take my attention back to business.

“Face-eaters,” I say. The term has caught on. They are collectively called that now. “Let’s go through the rules one more time.” I turn on my heel and pace in front of them. “One. You will not drool on her. Two. Licking is by invitation only.” I look at Jimmy for this. He’s our newest addition, purchased once we found out Ash was pregnant with Five. His ears prick up when he notices my attention. He’s a licker, so naturally, he objects to that one. “Three. No sniffing of—”